yes I almost forgot about win 7 64bit... but then I remembered reading how it improves things for 2010

yes.... I've been checking out i7s vs AMDs 1000s and it seems to specifically for rendering i7s do quite a bit better... which is however also reflected in the price tag.... hmm might spend the extra couple of hundred... don't think I can hold out till next year... I want it during the xmas holidays... hopefully some specials before xmas as well!

I'm going for 8GB, if I see any sort of bottle neck I'll propably upgrade to 12GB

I really want to take the plunge and go for SSD as the OS drive... I don't want to spend the extra on a RAID though, but rather an additional drive and back-up to that... doesn't raid auto copy everything and basically leave you with the capacity of one drive, but data loss prevention?

3D card not important? ... I suppose only the privew right? but do you get better/ faster previews?